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I’m watching a program on the Science Channel called “Planet Earth: The Future.”

I usually try to avoid these shows because they’re a flood of contextless statistics and “experts” who know nothing about the subject they’re actually discussing.

For example, right now Dr Sandra Postel: “Author and Global Water Analyst” is discussing the Colorado River’s “job functions.” She’s explaining that the river provides X and Y to Z and is no longer “performing it’s job.” She also talks about the “health” of the river. Someone should explain to her that a river isn’t a person.

If someone purposely made the river to serve a function, then you could say it isn’t “doing it’s job.” But the river was formed out of no conscious action by anyone. It rained a lot somewhere the formed a pool and the pool escaped and cut a path through the ground. Other stuff happened as a consequence of that. It wasn’t hired to perform a function. It’s called a positive externality.

She then proceeds to talk about hydroelectric dams and diverting water for irrigation of farms. She says “but it requires that we intervene, in a major way, into the hydrologic cycle. 70% of all the water we take out of rivers, lakes, aquifers, goes to irrigation. So it consumes the lion’s share of the water we’re taking out of the natural world [emphasis mine].” Followed by the narrator “is there really enough water to sustain 6 billion people?” We’re alive aren’t we?

“I think the good news on some of the water scarcity problems that we have, the shortages of water that we talk about, is that alot of the shortages and scarcity is really all about waste and mismangement. It’s not necessarily that there’s ‘not enough’ water, it’s just that we’re not using it wisely enough.”

Now, I don’t want to pick on Dr Postel much because she seems like a nice person, but what’s this “natural world” gobbeldy-gook? You could say she just means world minus human influence, but that’s just silly.

She gets some credit for the scarcity issue in the sense that she said “it’s not that there’s ‘not enough’” Although scarcity and shortages are always an economic question, not a quantitative one. This is especially true when the thing in question can be continuously divided for all practical discussion. Televisions could be in limited quantity, as you can’t have half a television, but you could always have half of any practical quantity of water. I don’t pay for water in my apartment. I pay no attention to how much I use. I probably let things run longer than I would if I were paying for it, although since I don’t know how much it costs per unit I can’t really say. I do however pay attention to my gas and electric usage.

This show is also odd in that it shows people who say contradicting things, but not in a pro-con argument, just different ways of telling us how horrible we are. Such as two different “experts” talking about American consumerism, etc. The first says that the earth can only sustain half of its current population, and that American consumers are using all the world’s resources. The second says that half of the world lives on less than two dollars a day and that’s criminal: we need to increase economic development to bring these people out of poverty and that American consumerism is making them poor.

Those don’t seem like contradictions, because they both blame American consumerism, but they are. There is no way that the world can both be “only able to sustain half of its current population” and there be any way to “bring half the world out of poverty.” These were people supposedly echoing the same line. But according to the first person’s statement, the request of the second person can’t be met and in fact makes the first person’s claim seem like a good thing considering.

Based on their notion of “sustainability,” in order to increase the economy of the poor half of the population you would have to decrease the economy of the rich half. But according the the first person, that’s not sustainable, which if sustainable means what it should mean, half the world would die. And at that point it would be some random half dying. But if that’s right, why would you bother doing anything, there’s already an “unsustainable” number of people on the earth, and we know who would go: the poor. If it’s unsustainable for them to be alive, then they will cease to be alive, and American consumerism will be sustainable.

All of this is utter non-sense. There is no reason for half the population to need to die. All of the earth’s population is sustainable, and at the theoretical point where there just physically isn’t enough stuff to allow people to live, people will slowly die off until there is an equilibrium.

“Unsustainable” is simply a term that gives someone an intelligent sounding word to call things they don’t like.